I have a nice shiny new demos page! This is mainly intended to be a landing page and something I send to game developers in particular, but any random netizen is welcome to check it out – and to give me any feedback/thoughts, if you like.
I also need to update the main page and playlist with Shadows Infinity stuff…. too much website making this week though!
I attended a service last Saturday marking 28 years since the first women were ordained in the Church of England, there in Bristol Cathedral. It was a moving and uplifting service and I was struck by the sense of history more than I was expecting…
Bristol University Schola Cantorum sang selections from my Missa Brevis as part of a very nicely chosen set of music: all the songs had either words or music or both by women. Which of course shouldn’t be a big deal but, you know, is. Extremely honoured to be heard alongside Hildegard of Bingen and my hero Catherine Winkworth!
I mean, the name is ridiculous and I dunno if I’ll stick with it – but I probably should. Ridiculous is absolutely fine for this. My some kind of crossover rpg fighting game soundtrack is nearly ready. And we’re going with Shadows/Infinity: Battle Zone, I guess. (Capitalistion is not confirmed, but high level of specific punctuation seems quite in-genre. And it comes from Shadows of Fortune, my first imaginary game series from my teenage years, x Infinity Crystal and Infinity Crisis. Plus “battle” because it’s a fighting game.)
And now… a listening page!
— and let me know any issues with playing these on various devices as well as whatever general feedback 🙂 Getting back into my webpage making and figuring out audio (…did you know the silent mode/physical mute button on the iPhone works in a REALLY INCONSISTENT WAY? Yeah.)
These are pre any final mixing and mastering (and only excerpts anyway), but here’s the general idea! Do you like the track art? 😀 it’s mostly from artbreeder.
I was putting all the tracks so far onto a playlist and iTunes, and it’s just tipped over the 1 hour mark, which is a nice mark, but aside from which… I think we’re just about if not completely done with this “OST”! …with the composing of it anyway, still in any case will have to go over everything and then do a little mastering and getting everything leveled and lined up and decide how looped I want to present things.
Here are some more clips of the tracks I’ve done since then! They’re a mix of battle themes and walking/story themes, often but not always based on Main Themes or World Map types.
What is this? As I explained/vaguely alluded to:
Continue readingLast night Bristol University Schola Cantorum was the guest choir at evensong at St Mary Redcliffe Church, and sung two parts from my piece Between in God’s eternity as the introit and anthem. I wrote this for the group a few years back, for a project specifically about sound and silence in a cathedral space. It wasn’t necessarily meant to fit the pattern of an Anglican service in this way, but that was always something I hoped would be possible, and the selections Emma Hornby made for this worked really well. “Bells”, sung at the start, uses the opening phrase “I will come into thy house” from “Psalm”, which is sung later.
Not sure how long this will stay up, but the service was livestreamed, so you can watch it online here:
(11:43 and 50:03 for the choir pieces.)
Flicking through the Lyra Eucharistica to sketch out things for the Catherine Winkworth songbook… actually most of the texts there aren’t Winkworth translations, but by a happy coincidence I ended up with one by her and two by another poet who I’ve actually set before as part of Between in God’s eternity.
Sketches below:
We had La La Bar – open mic musical theatre – the other night, where I played piano, and I think you might be able to hear a bit of influence of that style here. Not that “musical theatre” is a style exactly, but … styles, and the third one is very specifically wanting a full-on Sondheim accompaniment if I could sing and play it at the same time. So they’re actually pretty much not super-congregational-friendly in this case.
1.
Continue readingGive us our daily Bread,
O God, the Bread of Strength
For we have learnt to know
How weak we are at length :
As children we are weak,
As children must be fed ;
Give us Thy Grace, O Lord,
To be our daily Bread.
Taking a little break from work on my some-kind-of-crossover-rpg-fighting-game soundtrack to return to the sounds of last year’s Infinity Crisis OST…
This is — imagining there’s a sequel or kind of DLC adventure… I’m imagining it covers the story of main character’s love interest who spends quite a lot of time separated and doing her own thing off-screen during the first game… So now we see her side of the story! Or something. I have no immediate plans to actually write a whole nother soundtrack for this, but it’s in the back of my mind as a possibility.
For now, here’s a one-off: a slow ish thematic piece with the same soundset except changing out the electric cello from Crisis with an erhu.
The end has a little quote from ‘Stay Thy Tears’.
The sheet music for this year’s PIANOWRIMO (November 2021) is now available to buy and download on gumroad. Go here to take a look 🙂
With this book of 30 pieces, in the 5th year of the challenge… that totals 150 piano pieces for this project…